Reassessing an Uproar in Architecture

Adolf Loos, the enigmatic Moravian-born architect, is better known for his writings than his buildings. A century after the publication of his polemical essay “Ornament and Crime,” a Columbia University exhibition called “Adolf Loos: Our Contemporary” examines his enduring relevance.
— nytimes.com

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It always amazes me that people can discuss Loos without giving ANY attention to his interiors. The images one always sees with Loos are of planes of stucco with punched windows. But the interiors are complex and luxurious!

This book shows the Villa Muller as what it is: a quiet sheath wrapped around one of the most luxurious, decadent, exuberant interior designs I've ever seen. It's brilliant, yet somehow every wants to ignore Loos' LOVE of ornament (refined ornament, that is) and pretend he's only about plain boxes.

To quote Loos approximately: the potter sits in anticipation in front of the kiln, waiting to finally see what beautiful colors God, in his infinite wisdom, left for Man to create. Loos loved color - and a plane of fabulously veined marble is one of the most decadent surfaces we have the pleasure of enjoying.

Nicely put Donna. My guess is Loos's own dogma of anti-ornament and the belittlement of sensual beauty precludes the ability to pivot as needed. Unfotrunatly, this general disdain for decoration, be it interior or exterior, is our modernist inheritance, even though it flies in the face of what we all do with our own personal spaces, ie. express ourselves.

Unfortunatley, Loos and many of his contemporary's schizophrenic relationship to beauty is a legacy that still hangs over the profession like dead weight. I'd attribute it to the moralising on beauty that began in ernest with Ruskin and eventually morphed into an almost nihilistic view of what was permisable in the brave new world we where promised.

I can only speak from my own experience that in Arch History in undergrad (four semesters which were great in pretty much every other way) all we were taught of Loos was "Ornament is A Crime" and "here are a bunch of plain white stucco boxes he built". I never knew of his interiors until I went to Prague and saw Villa Muller. He was a hedonist! He's been totally mis-represented and lumped in with the Bauhaus, in my opinion, because his exteriors photograph so easily.

hedonists unite! I think the title was Ornament and Crime. It reminds me of those peroidic spasams of guilt for over consumption people and societies go through. Bonfire of the Vanities and the like. If it provides a respite from the monotony of repetition, count me in. Just make sure they don't burn the whole thing down.

well,then...we can understand from Loos that an instance of abstaining from ornament might be like John Cage's 4'33''. once the silence is performed once, successive performances of silences attain other meanings that defeat the purpose of the composion (that is to silence our expectations in being exposed to it in lieu of music). thus the lack of ornament becomes an expectation, that is an ornament.

isn't there a sense of protectionaism on the part of Loos though? He might have though of 'abstaining from ornament' as an opus to be performed once and by him (him as the composer of silence with all copyrights attached). He didn't forsee that silence (of ornament, its absence) , being something that cannot be copywritten, exists as...what we call today...an open source.

if pursued to its conclusion: with minimalism, the silence became deafening. it wasn't like the orchestra simply stopped playing for the 4'33'' as it did with John Cage's installation-composition. Rather, the musical instruments were picked up and played the silence full blast with all the marked dynamics and exact tempos of the score.

But Loos' work *does not* lack for ornament. The ornament is the material itself and the composition in proportion of the elements and the way one moves through them in space. There's nothing missing - Loos is not "abstaining" - because every moment of the work has been considered and balanced with everything else.

Related to moving bodily through the space of an architecture composition, 4'33" is different for everyone who experiences it in every venue every time. The surprise of it the first time it was performed is no different from the surprise of *any* composition the first time it's performed.

(The title is Ornament and Crime, but I feel like I learned that when ti was first published in English it was mistranslated as "Ornament is A Crime".)

Donna, you might think so...and from where you stand, i see your point. But loos removed then conventional ornament in order to bring forward (or, if one casts doubt as to whether this was the primary reason in place of the actual subtraction - which, in my mind, stands as the primary intention (in itself a reason) - then thereafter effected) the properties of materials as newly foregrounded properties. The first act is to remove and subtract no? To clean under our feet as is cited in the article. The commonplace sensibility then was different -differing necessarily from our sensibility...they had to create this myth of material honesty=beauty which today is a commonplace. His generation would have existed in a period of rupture and change on those grounds. So, this act of removal is very significant and we should not underrmine it based on current habitude and sensibilities. In other words, The first thing people would see, then, is the absence of ornament. The first thing people would see now would(arguably, generally, depending where you are) would be ...everything else.

It thus took this subtraction and this lack to allow a context for the other features and for the transformation of the semantic of 'ornament'. His generation then bridged the semantic transformation of the word. So yes, it lacked ornament (as understood then and not as you choose to understand now). Maybe one has to be an archeologist here to compare - not an architect.

About 4'33", it is of course unlike any composition in that it isn't one (cummon). The first time it was performed, people expected music. They got silence. Hence my comparison above to the subtraction of ornament. After the first performance and the press releases, people started expecting 4'33"as an actual composition (personally, i can only conceive of it -rather than hear it- as an installation), it became a product to be (not) played. People expected not to expect silence as we now expect not to expect ornament in post-loos minimalist architecture. Whether the primary reason was to make us hear other sounds in the auditorium or not is the counterpart to the question whether it wasLoos' intention to let us see the properties of materials as foreground - this comes after the subtraction.

So Loos (and others) introduced the shock of absence before the shock transformed into an expectation. And a shock foregrounds itselh ahead of all pleasantries thereafter introduced.

commonplace sensibility then was different -differing necessarily from our sensibility...they had to create this myth of material honesty=beauty which today is a commonplace.

I'm going to guess that material honesty was always an issue about cost, most people knowing that when you can't get the real thing, you get close (stone vs. stucco). It was only in the 19th and early 20th century that architects raised it to an obsession.

It thus took this subtraction and this lack to allow a context for the other features and for the transformation of the semantic of 'ornament'.

If I understand semantic ornament correctly, I'd agree that for architects who abstained from employing ornament (for whatever reasons) they began to look for other ways of expressing the impulse to "ornament" for pleasure, be it visual, intellectual or both.

People expected not to expect silence as we now expect not to expect ornament in post-loos minimalist architecture.

I find that "people" still expect ornament (for those inclined this way) simply because ornament is through out our culture. Some architects have come to expect no ornament in post-loos minimalist architecture, but for those not strapped into the zeitgeist express, and who look at their environment critically there are other expectations. Not everyone read or bought in to Loos's theories about Ornament and Crime.

So Loos (and others) introduced the shock of absence before the shock transformed into an expectation.

I'd agree with this, again more for architects than not. The need to "shock" has become a staple of our architectural culture to the point where the most banal and simplistic work is passed off as interesting simply because it hasn't been done before. This is where architecture has divorced itself most from society as a whole. The need to "Shock and Awe" sometimes over rides other considerations.

Thayer, with the reservation that by claiming something as a "myth", one does/should not disqualify the validity that a myth has for a culture at its time.

But I guess the modern person is in a difficult position - if you choose to embrace mythopoesis, you foreground it in a manner that is not conducive to it - it turns esoteric and self referential (i have in mind lethaby and his archi-mysticism for instance. to a lesser extent, i have in mind the belief that a historical style X speaks more relevantly(ie more 'truthfully') than a historical style Y -could be the modern style- in relation so a society Z). in this manner, myth has been elevated to the level of conscious fetishism, manipulation and exchange - its true nature and power - the power to infiltrate and infuence the mind- however, has been subverted. it becomes nothing more than a flat vocabulary of signs, an anatomy and a caricature of myth and not myth proper.

on the other hand, if you dismiss it altogether on the basis of some (mythical) functionalist rationality, you dismiss the very rational certainty that many aspects of our life and thoughts, cultures and economies are themselves reflections of current myths we have apropos how we conceive of the world and are products of an evolution of myths.

We see how, for instance, parametricist design - per Schumacher and co- falls in this trap. It is a design philosophy that is highly mythopoetic, in fact it is so much so that it is almost pantheistic (techno-pantheistis maybe?) - it seeks to emulate nature and natural processes. The myth is that natural processes (emergence and the growth of structures) speaks more relevantly/honestly/truthfully to our society and exists as the ultimate revelation (the teleological self fruition of history) - and that is nothing but a myth, and their belief in this myth. But the pathology (itself owing to an ill-placed myth) noted above of denying mythopoetic thought dictates that the mythical association with/to nature remains concealed and subliminal. Their language used to think out that genre of work and present it is, instead, functionalist, scientific, neoliberalist...The language must be contaminated by the primary material (nature and its functionalism) in order to appear consistent with the mythical denial of myth. We see how the rhetoric of this group is incarcerated, closed, claustrophobic and just as much self referential as those who have chosen to do the opposite - to elevate myths to the level of conscious exchange. it is, in other words, a religion with its kohens, its religious literature. it equates the object of its belief with 'truth' and cannot admit to the mythical associations bridging them to their God.

I'm reading this new book, Why We Build by Rowan Moore that had some interesting tidbits of my main man Adolph Loos. The guy was definatly deep into stuff.

"Men, in fact are worse than beasts. Unlike animals, who only want sex 'once a year', men want it all the time. 'And our sensuality is not simple but complicated, not natural but against nature.' On the other hand, 'that which is noble in a woman knows only one desire: that she hold on to her place by the side of the big, strong man.' So she has to win his unnatural love:

If it were natural, the woman would be able to approach the man naked, but the naked woman is unattractiveto the man.

Thus 'the woman is forced to appeal to the man's sensuality through her clothing, to appeal unconsciously to his sickly sensuality.' She has to ornament herself, and wear long impractical skirts that stress her decorative rather than useful role.

Just a note, Loos dosen't see the "useful role" of attraction in animals. Dang nab it! On the other hand, does he try to make lemnonade out of lemons...

At the end of the article Loos unexpectedly turns these argumants into a call for the emancipation, of a kind, of women: 'no longer an appeal to sensuality, but rather by economic independance earned through work will the woman bring about her equal status with the man...the velvet and silk, flowers and ribbons, feathers and paints will fail to have their effect. They will disappear.

Well, that didn't work out, but wow and analyst would have a field day on this guy, god bless his soul. But as the writtrer continues...

This (Ladies' Fashion article) was a rehersal for Loos' most famous and influential essay, Ornament and Crome, of 1908. Here he announced that 'the evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from objects of daily use'. Children or primitive people might blamelessly use ornament, like 'the Papuan' who 'tattoos his skin, his boat, his oar, in short, everything that is within his reach'. But 'the modern man who tattoos himself is a criminal or degenerate'.

The origin of the whole decoration is for feeble minds meme that is still with us. Classy.

Dec 10, 13 7:22 am

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